Overall, Monday’s Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing with retired NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci was a bust. Many Republicans (with the exception of Marjorie Taylor Greene) engaged in some vaccine-related nauseating contortions, Democrats behaved as expected, and for the most part, saintly Fauci answered questions the way he always has — with many not-quite-true statements interspersed with evasive language.
Still, there were some notable themes in the hearing that, when combined with media coverage, show the direction in which the Democrats’ messaging efforts are heading. These themes are:
- A laboratory leak as the origin of the pandemic is “possible” and “not a conspiracy theory”
- The efforts by Fauci’s senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, to evade FOIA took place in a vacuum, and no one else at NIAID would ever have acted in this way.
- Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) are the real villains here for not reporting things on time or in full, and Fauci’s subordinates at NIAID never alerted him to problems with the EHA.
- There were never any studies to support the CDC’s mask mandate in schools, but that’s OK because we all just did our best at the beginning of the pandemic – and we never forced states and localities to comply long-term.
By listing these, I am by no means saying that I agree with them. But we should all be prepared for the mainstream media and Fauci cult followers to seize on these arguments and pretend that they have always supported the lab leak theory, for example. And we should all be prepared for any failures by NIAID that cannot be sugarcoated to be the fault of everyone at the agency except Fauci.
The news stories began on Sunday when Fauci’s opening remarks were posted online. In them, he distanced himself from Dr. David Morens, who tried to circumvent FOIAs by using a personal email and other methods. Fauci said:
Dr. David Morens, who held the title of Senior Advisor to the NIAID Director during my tenure as NIAID Director, was recently investigated for conduct unbecoming a government official. Given his title, there is a natural connection to me. I was unaware of his actions in supporting Dr. Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, or that he was conducting NIH business through his personal email account or deleting emails to avoid FOIAs. Several years ago, Dr. Morens was transferred from a scientific division of NIAID to support me write scientific papers and review the scientific literature on infectious diseases. After his transfer, we needed a title for him, and we chose the empirical title of Senior Advisor to the NIAID Director. It is vital to note for the record that despite his title, Dr. Morens was not functionally an advisor to me on institute policy or other substantive issues. He is a scientist, science writer, and historian. At NIAID, we had a weekly meeting of the Executive Committee of the Institute’s Directors, which, to my knowledge, he did not attend. We had a daily morning meeting of the immediate management staff of the Director’s Office, which, to my knowledge, he did not attend. Also, his office is in a different building than the NIAID Director’s.
Oh, sure, there’s just a presumption that he’s connected to Fauci. You know what we haven’t seen in Morens’ published emails? We haven’t seen a single one of the people he corresponded with that raised any questions about the quality of Morens’ connection to Fauci. There’s nothing like, “Oh, you can bring printed emails to his house? I didn’t realize you worked so closely with Tony.”
And of course Fauci doesn’t need an advisor on institutional policy or other issues because he is the science, so Morens can’t really have been an advisor to Fauci (/sarcasm).
Fauci continued:
Finally, a Majority Staff memorandum dated May 22, 2024, contains a statement: “Dr. Fauci may have conducted official business via personal email.” Let me state for the record that, to my knowledge, I have never conducted official business via personal email.
“To the best of my knowledge and belief.” When records of Fauci’s private emails eventually emerge showing that he conducted official business through that email address, he will no doubt say he did not lie, because he had forgotten about those cases, or something along those lines.
The only problem was that we already had contemporary emails from Morens proving Fauci’s involvement.
Fauci personally gave Morens some advice on how to prevent his emails from being disclosed.
He asked him to get a private mobile phone and to stop using a government phone for his Gmail account, as otherwise it would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Morens had to get one. In the meantime, Keusch had to… pic.twitter.com/JE8kf0aL98
— Gilles Demaneuf (@gdemaneuf) June 3, 2024
During his testimony, Fauci uttered a different tune at least three times when it came to the lab leak theory, and in his pre-filed opening statement, he claimed he had always been open-minded about the lab leak theory:
My answer to the ultimate question about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has also received considerable attention: Was it a lab leak or a natural spillover from an animal reservoir? I have repeatedly stated that I am completely unbiased on either possibility and that if definitive evidence is available to confirm or disprove either theory, I will readily accept it.
During questioning, Fauci said the theory of the origin of the lab leak was not a “conspiracy theory,” and at least some prominent Democratic committee members – Representatives Jamie Raskin and Raul Ruiz – made statements along the same lines.
In addition, on Monday morning, the New York Times published a guest article by molecular biologist Alina Chan titled “Why the pandemic probably started in a lab — in 5 key points.”
The New York Times putting interactive resources under an article arguing that COVID is most likely the result of a lab leak seems like a pretty vital discourse shift. https://t.co/ZZNTwLOX3M
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) June 3, 2024
It seems like the signal is being sent.
Another signal is being sent regarding Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. Since Dr. David Morens and Daszak are long-time friends, it is in Fauci’s interest to distance himself from both of them and blame them for any wrongdoing – and that is exactly what he is doing. During the hearing, he said he agreed with the exclusion of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance.
🚨Dr. Fauci changes his position on the EcoHealth Alliance🚨
His agency funded this disgraced organization. Now Dr. Fauci agrees @COVIDSelect that the EcoHealth Alliance and its President, Dr. Peter Daszak, should never again receive a single cent from the U.S. taxpayer. pic.twitter.com/7FMlIpNO8e
— Special Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) June 3, 2024
Fauci also admitted that the EHA was behind on required reporting on the grant awarded to the EHA and the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that he was not aware of it at the time. He also suggested that the required reporting on the grant may not be complete, which could be a precursor to the revelation of more negative information about Daszak and the EHA.
As RedState’s Bob Hoge reported on Sunday, a transcript of Fauci’s two-day testimony (conducted in January 2024) was released over the weekend showing that neither the mask mandate nor the 6-foot distancing rule that schools and businesses have been required to follow during the pandemic were based on science. Fauci has maintained all along that any “mitigation” or “prevention” efforts are based on science and should not be questioned. He was finally forced to admit that at the time the CDC issued this “guideline,” there were no studies proving the effectiveness of masks in containing COVID, but claimed that any study would have been unethical, so we would just have to accept it. Which, as we all know, is bullshit.
RELATED Fauci: I made it all up
To make matters worse, when confronted with the extreme and sometimes irreparable harm caused to the American people by these unscientific orders, Fauci tried to evade any responsibility by claiming that individual states and municipalities were making their own decisions about how long to implement these measures and were not forced to do so.
If Fauci didn’t agree with these measures continuing indefinitely, he certainly had a humorous way of showing it. Representative Rich McCormick illustrated this perfectly during the hearing when he played an audio recording of an interview Fauci gave to a biographer in 2020. In it, he called objections to the COVID vaccine “ideological bullshit” and said that people would refrain from that ideological bullshit when their livelihoods or other vital things in life were threatened.
Dr. Fauci is more like Dr. Fear. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/BRdDb1MX03
— Congressman Rich McCormick, MBA MD (@RepMcCormick) June 3, 2024
Reasonable people who have lived through the pandemic and still hope for accountability (which may be a futile hope at this point) need to be on guard and ready to loudly fight back when Fauci, Morens, Daszak, Walensky and the rest completely change their minds and then act like they’ve been with us all along.
